Intel and The Low-Cost Blade Servers

Intel is known in the computer hardware business as a company that doesn't let any opportunity slip away. So, as the blade servers are gaining more popularity on the small business market, Intel is paying close attention to the trend and even plans to develop and launch a new line of server products. Until now, the champion of blade servers was the HP company that produced and sold its own servers. As more hardware manufacturers and vendors are heading into the blade server market it looks like a unified specifications system is needed in order to maintain a coherent server standard and production.

The first edition of the Modular Server Specifications was developed by the Server System Infrastructure (SSI for short) Forum and just like a reference design, those specifications outline several design guides to help producers. "For the developers -- the board, chassis, and power supply vendors that are doing the actual development -- it gives them a common point of reference to bring to market platforms that can easily integrate with other vendors' products," said Patrick Buddenbaum, blade marketing director at Intel's Server Platforms Group, in a telephone interview, cited by the Web based news site InfoWorld. According to IDC, blade servers represent the fastest growing server market because of its design and price advantages over traditional server solutions, as the blade design means that the hardware components are tightly packed together saving both space and power.

In an attempt to reduce costs and make the blade server design more popular among producers and customers the Server System Infrastructure Forum developed the server specifications draft that looks for components that are already on the market and not a specialized one that would require more money and time to implement. From both the customers' and the producers' point of view, blade servers are very expensive to design, produce and acquire. "The entry cost for blade servers, even though it's the fastest growing part of the server market, is extremely high," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group.

According to InfoWorld, Buddenbaum explains that "Most of the blade development that's been done in the industry has been the focus of multinational corporations". "A lot of the peripheral vendors, the ODMs (original design manufacturer, the local OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), and resellers are not present in the blade market today". Even so, there are 17 different blade server designs in use, of which only three are responsible for more than 90 percent of the total market available, so a unified design is highly desired.